Eric Ries: “Don’t Be In A Rush To Get Big, Be In A Rush To Have A Great Product”

"Be skeptical of inspirational quotes ascribed to great men"

- Gandhi

You haven't included Digg - a perfect example of getting big instead of polishing the product.

Don't the fathers of lean generally believe that if you think you've got the next FB, throw away all our advice?

I believe I heard something like that on a video.

Interesting question. My take would be that you need to toe the line between building something quick and dirty, and building something that can scale. If you can't get the features right then scaling is a non issue. If you do get them right, the nature of this type of business is that it will grow quickly - whether you like it or not. So you have to be able to add scale quickly or it can fall apart due to unavailability (people often attribute friendster with this outcome). These might be the hardest businesses to start, because in addition to cracking the chicken/egg problem, you have to steer a fine line between development speed and scalability.

Sean Ellis recently did a good presentation on this, highlighting whats different for network effect businesses:

http://startup-marketing.com/bringing-a-network-effect-busin...

I think Eric's point for a business like that would be given a choice between burning time and money scaling (ie. big launch and marketing on customer acquisition) spend it on a few more iterations of refining the product, AND seeing how a small number real customers react to it.

How about Twitter? They made a product that couldn't scale, and are still doing OK.

A DB server with 256GB of RAM, 2 sockets, and multiple SSD drives can serve a lot of queries. Use that for posts, and a few slaves for reads / caching. It will cost something like $60k plus hosting fees and maintenance. But it will certainly serve 99% of web businesses as a db.

As long as your basic queries scale linearly (or maybe log-linearly), you can buy your way out of the kind of trouble most web companies would kill for.

faster is better

Ideas are never truly unique. No matter how special they might seem to you, rest assure that at least a sufficient amount of people have been sensitive to the zeitgeist to pick up the same, seemingly weak, signals that lead you to that idea of yours. Ergo, you need to be agile, to iterate fast and competently to flesh out and develop the idea into a business.

If you have infinite runway you don't need to listen to Eric Ries or anybody else. Build whatever you want. Take as long as you want. Give the stuff you built away in your will when you die. Or, have your executors burn it all in a massive bonfire.

Most of us do not have infinite runway, however.

And even if you do: There is an optimum pace at which to create any given work of art. Working on it too much can be just as bad as working on it too little. The momentum runs down. The zeitgeist changes. The authors become too familiar with the product to see it afresh. The fanbase gets bored and stops paying attention. And the stakes get higher: The longer you work on something, the more of your reputation is tied up with that thing.

Thats funny. What is it about marketers overdoing title case in setting they write anyways?

I actually added this line to a clients stylesheet once:

* { text-transform: capitalize !important; }

...trying to demonstrate how ridiculous his headlines looked.

When he said he loved it, I decided never to work for him again.